Khaula Jamil – Author of Raw Life

Luxury publishers Still Waters Publishing launch author Khaula Jamil and her debut book of sensational graphic design and photography value, Raw Life. Khaula Jamil was born and raised in Karachi and read Communication Design at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. After graduating, Khaula worked as an Art Director for TV commercials with a local filmmaker. A year later, she turned to photography full-time. She spends her time travelling and freelancing as a photographer, graphic designer and occasionally as a videographer. In 2008, she was granted the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship for a Masters in Photography, commencing in the US in August 2009. Khaula chats to us exclusively about her debut book.

Please introduce yourself to our readers:
I come from a very creative sort of family. My grandfather is a poet, my father a television actor, my mother paints beautifully and I am the youngest of three sisters, both of whom are artistically inclined. I suppose my line of work was predestined since I grew up in very multi creative surroundings!

Tell us about Raw Life and the people who feature in your book.
Raw Life explores notions of creativity by focusing on the artistic process of 10 creative professionals from Karachi. Each of the Creatives featured hails from a distinct genre ranging from Music and Film, to Art and Comedy. This book highlights the thoughts, opinions, angst and achievements of people who delight in grand dreams and imagine a magnificent future for a beloved Pakistan. Raw Life is thus a valuable tool to motivate aspiring Creatives, whatever their chosen domain.

What was your inspiration behind Raw Life and why did you publish this now?
The impetus for the Raw Life series of books lies in two separate events. First, for five years now, I have beenphotographing, writing and maintaining a blog of my own. As a spin-off of http://www.asofterworld.com , I have adopted a photo-blogging style consisting of my views on various things. Over time I have received hundreds of messages from people across the globe telling me how my imagery and thoughts have inspired them, and brought out a sense of creativity in even the most so called non-creative individuals.

Second, studying in a local Art college, I felt there was a dearth of information regarding creative professionals in Pakistan. Apart from a few websites and magazines I could not find details on anyone who had made a career in creativity. The publications that did exist failed to answer the deeper, rawer questions I was struggling with. This sparked thoughts about the role of Creatives in Pakistan. What were they doing to solidify their sense of identity as a community of designers? How were they educating aspiring Creatives on how to bring their dreams to reality when they were so inaccessible?

Still Waters is a publishing company that encourages this sort of research and realised the importance of sharing this kind of knowledge with everyone who was interested in creative practices. My book is their third publication.

What is the significance of the title of your book, Raw Life?
“Raw” by virtue of it’s definition means something that has not been processed or refined. It is something that exists in its natural state. Raw opinions are untainted. When you read my book you will realize why it is called Raw Life. All ten individuals in the book have been open, honest and utterly blunt about themselves, their lives, their careers and their take on various subjects. Also, I consider them raw in the sense that they are still in the influx of their careers. They are on the path to greatness but what makes them real to me is the fact that they have not done their greatest work yet. They are not untouchable and that is what makes them Raw.

Do you think that your education combined with your experience in art direction helped shape the thrust and visual direction of the book?
My education has perhaps played the most significant role when it came to shaping this book. It is because I studied in an Art collegethat made me aware of the great creative work that is happening in Pakistan. Once I had decided on the people who would feature in the book, whose work I felt directly spoke to me, I conducted lengthy one on one interviews which automatically made designing their particular sections simpler. As a graphic designer, often when you speak to people, you can actually start putting colours and shapes to their personality!

You stress the importance of breaking stereotypes associated with the word ‘Creative’ – to you, what does this word and concept represent?
Creativity cannot be defined in any particular way. It is too diverse a concept to have it weighed down with one final notion. That is the whole point of this book. In Raw Life you have ten different opinions from ten highly creative individuals about what creativity is to them that makes you realize “Creativity” can be pretty much anything you want it to be. Yes, there are some certain rules all creative’s follow and live by, again, those you will be able to identify when you read Raw Life and see the consistency of certain opinions but at the end of the day there is no hard and fast right and wrong where creativity is concerned.

Tell us about the process of involving those that you did in your book – was it difficult for these celebrities to open their lives to you and to a book whose title is at the end of the day, ‘Raw Life’?
I think everyone in the book was intrigued, if nothing else, by my curiosity. I already knew some of the individuals who feature in the book (the benefits of belonging to anArt college) but more than half of them had no clue who I was! All of them however, completely opened up to me without any hesitation. The reason they did that, I feel, is because I was not some reporter trying to know them for the sake of entertainment. My purpose had nothing to do with how they lived their personal lives and of their personal choices. It was about the creative aspect of their life. It was about what they could tell me about their process and journey towards creativity that may help inspire aspiring Creatives. I think each of the ten people understood that this project was in the name of creativity and they were ready to be a part of it wholeheartedly.

Can your work be categorized in a specific genre?
I suppose if one must categorize this kind of a project it would come under “Graphic Design” or “Visual Art”.

Do you think it is important for such art, design and concepts to be incorporated into the Pakistani literary and educational system?
That goes without saying. I think Still Waters Publishing is God sent for that purpose. They help spread the awareness and people have started realizing and appreciating art and design because they know about it now.

Can we expect you to release another coffee table book post masters?
Inshallah. Definitely.

Lastly, your message to the readers:
Don’t be afraid to be creative- just do it!

What Makes Bad Writing By CYNTHIA CROSSEN

My book club had a lively discussion last month about the difference between good and bad writing. Can you elucidate?

—P.P., Cleveland

A few weeks ago, I was reading “People Who Eat Darkness” by Richard Lloyd Parry and came to this sentence on page three: “Exhausted tubes of toothpaste curl on the edges of the sink, sodden lumps of soap drool in the floor of the shower.” My heart sank. I couldn’t read a whole book written with such strained, anthropomorphic racket. Unless Mr. Parry calmed down, which in the end he mostly did, I would not be able to finish this otherwise absorbing story.

It’s impossible to define bad writing because no one would agree on a definition. We all know it when we see it, and we all see it subjectively. I remember going almost mad with irritation at how many times Carolyn Chute used the phrase “fox-color eyes” in her best-selling novel “The Beans of Egypt, Maine”—bad writing, I thought. On Amazon, other readers called it “brilliant.”

Similarly, this second sentence in Gail Jones’s novel “Five Bells” was the last sentence of hers I read: “Before she saw the bowl of bright water, swelling like something sexual, before she saw the blue, unprecedented, and the clear sky sloping upwards, she knew from the lilted words it would be a circle like no other, key to a new world.” Professional reviewers described Ms. Jones’s prose as “intensely lyrical” and “poetic.”

I’m tempted to say that the only universally acknowledged characteristic of bad writing is that you can’t understand it, but even that’s not true. In the late 1990s, the journal Philosophy and Literature sponsored a contest to identify the worst sentences in published academic prose. I cite this third-place winner only because it has the rare virtue of being short: “The lure of imaginary totality is momentarily frozen before the dialectic of desire hastens on within symbolic chains.”

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White in “The Elements of Style” would respond to what seems like intentional obscurity—both in academia and fiction—by saying, “Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!” “The Elements of Style” remains the single best primer on writing English with “cleanliness, accuracy and brevity,” and if writers take only one piece of advice from it, let it be “Omit needless words!”

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A woman reads a book near posters of the ‘Twilight’ saga.

Roger H. Garrison, author of “How a Writer Works,” described bad writers as those who fall victim to the “tides of phony, posturing, pretentious, tired, imprecise slovenly language, which both suffocate and corrupt the mind.” That’s a good start, but I’d add repetitious, smug and disrespectful of readers’ time.

The lean editing staffs of even the most reputable publishers mean that authors aren’t likely to get the Max Perkins treatment anymore (read A. Scott Berg’s biography, “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius,” to see the kind of help Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe got with their writing). Typos have become a fact of life even in well-published books now, and I’ve trained myself to ignore them, but I am often shocked by how badly some books need to be trimmed. Overwriting is definitely bad writing, and there is a lot of it out there.

The vast majority of the subjects of Nick Page’s book “In Search of the World’s Worst Writers” are overwriters. “Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860-1939) is the greatest bad writer who ever lived,” Mr. Page writes. As evidence, he quotes this line from one of her novels: “Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue.” C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, among other Oxford literati, reportedly held contests to see who could read her work longest without breaking into guffaws.

Some readers, and I know a few of them, don’t care how a story is written as long as it’s comprehensible and keeps them turning pages—”The Da Vinci Code,” for example, or “Twilight” or “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Responding to a question about “Twilight” on a Yahoo Answers page, a reader wrote, “I never quit reading a book because I think the style of writing is bad. It may not be bad, just different from what I’m used to. Focus on the story more than the writing style.”

I sometimes wish I could do that so I could enjoy the occasional airport book. Unfortunately, I feel as the mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers did: “The most intricate plot ever woven will never carry bad writing,” she wrote in “Style in Crime Stories—Why Good Writing Pays.” “But good writing will often carry a thin plot, and really inspired writing will carry almost anything.”

REVIEW: The Perfect Gentleman: A Muslim Boy Meets the West

by Joanne Latimer

Ahmad was a Pakistani immigrant in the suburbs of London in the 1970s and 1980s. Predictably, the racism he encountered was wicked, yet he accomplishes a delightful feat with this memoir. He presents a hilarious tale where bigotry, wars, and religion play the straight man to his dry wit.

Ahmad’s survival skill is social assimilation, which begins with the cultivation of an English accent he describes as “perfect BBC.” Yet he is plagued by qualms about abandoning Islam for “vicarage garden party lukewarm Christianity.” Ahmad’s childhood pronouncements about Christianity (“There’s bad news about Jesus,” he reports of the Crucifixion) and Islam (“We make the Amish look like swingers”) are highly entertaining. Should Inuit be expected to fast for Ramadan, he wonders, considering their long days? When he finally gets an invitation for casual sex at university, he can’t figure out the logistics (“Where do I put my clothes?”). Ahmad survives three conversion attempts, deciding to stick with Islam after hearing a tape by the famous Canadian Muslim, Dr. Gary Miller. As a grad student with an Alfa Romeo and a microwave, he figures he can finally attract a girlfriend. “It didn’t go quite as expected,” is his comical refrain throughout.

This laugh-out-loud book has a deceptively simple structure, with each chapter representing a school year of his life, including summer vacation. It doesn’t feel like a literary crutch because it reflects Ahmad’s orderly, rational character. The complexity of his spiritual searching—and his desire for better cars—increases with each chapter. Funny stories about his Jaguar XJS and crushes on girls keep things light, but the book’s real value is in Ahmad’s explanation of misunderstandings between secular Westerners and Christian culture and the multi-faceted Muslim world. A feminist and a peacemaker, our “perfect gentleman” has this reader impatient for the sequel.

To order: visit http://www.libertybooks.com

LIT BUZZ: Comic book drawing sells for 1.3 million euros

From InpaperMagzine | 1 day ago

A rare 1932 cover drawing of a Tintin comic book has been sold for a record 1.3 million euros at an auction in Paris. The previous record — of 764,000 euros — was also set by this Tintin in America cover, hand-drawn by Belgian writer and illustrator Herge. Tintin in America is the third title in the comic book series, The Adventures of Tintin.

The cover shows the young adventurer Tintin, dressed as a cowboy and sitting with his dog, Snowy, as axe-wielding American Indians creep up on them. The plot revolves around Tintin and his dog traveling to the US to report on a crime syndicate.

The drawing was bought by a private collector.

The Indian ink and gouache drawing work is one of only five remaining such works by Herge — real name Georges Remi — who died in 1983. Only two of those are in private hands.

Saturday’s sale was part of a rare larger sale of Tintin memorabilia, reportedly including draft sketches of Tintin and a copy of Explorers on the Moon, signed by the first people to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and fellow astronaut Michael Collins.

COVER STORY: Time’s winged chariot hurrying near

Reviewed by Nadir Hasan | From InpaperMagzine | 1 day ago

The first couple of dozen pages of Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s novel Between Clay and Dust bring to mind the film The Wrestler. An aging pahalwan, long past his glory days, seems to be suffering an emotional crisis as the gifts that defined him slowly wither away. Anyone who has suckled at the Hollywood teat could be excused for assuming that the story of the wrestler, Ustad Ramzi, will progress in an exhilarating feel-good fashion as he gears up for one final redemptive fight.

But Farooqi isn’t a writer who is interested in the kind of Rocky-style redemption that the movies love presenting to us. His character is a realist who understands that his fighting days will soon be over but a romantic who doesn’t want the declining pahalwani culture to disappear altogether or even bypass his clan.

The core of Between Clay and Dust lies in the fraught relationship between Ramzi and his younger brother Tamami, the heir apparent whose devotion to the pahalwan lifestyle is limited to its perks and privileges. This deceptively simple tale of sibling tensions explores moral dilemmas that transcend the pahalwan culture Farooqi writes about so evocatively. For Ramzi, the title of ustad carries with it responsibilities that others may consider menial, like assiduously cleaning the akhara every morning.
Such daily chores serve as a reminder that an honorific, once bestowed, must be continuously re-earned. That is a lesson Ramzi tries to pass on to Tamami and it is one that seems to be beyond the abilities of even the most able wrestler in the land.

Tempting though it may be to paint Ramzi as the wise saint, Farooqi is too shrewd an observer of human nature to fall for that trap. In Tamami’s silent stewing at the training he is being forced to endure we see that Ramzi may be guilty of seeing his younger brother not as a separate human being but as an extension of his hopes and desires. In one finely-observed set-piece, Ramzi gets cross at Tamami for taking too long to win a fight. Tamami replies, “I was just trying to see what he knew.” This
is a problem with Ramzi: he is too devoted to his own life to consider the perspective of others.

In accordance with pahalwan culture as he sees it, Ramzi does not allow himself any aesthetic pleasures other than regularly attending the performances of courtesan Gohar Jan. Like Ramzi, Gohar Jan is struggling to accept that her profession may no longer hold the same cultural allure it once did. Her kotha is slowly becoming more decrepit and it is only a matter of time before she is forced to shutter its doors for good. The relationship between Ramzi and Gohar is always romantic but never sexual. The parallelism of their situations is obvious and it is this that draws them towards each other. Both respect the talents of the other, leading Gohar to continue performing for Ramzi even after her looks have faded and she no longer appears in public for her other former fans.

In their unlikely friendship we see the pull cultural traditions continue to exert on their practitioners. Both find it difficult to adjust to a world where their value has depreciated even if they deal with it in different ways. Ramzi is continually disappointed in his brother while Gohar treats her ward, Malka, with far greater sympathy. She trains Malka in the arts of music and dance but never tries to impose it on her, even though Malka has an eagerness and passion for this life that Tamami never hinted at possessing.

In telling a story so fraught with emotionality, a writer may succumb to the temptations of melodrama. Farooqi, however, is too unhurried and serene in his prose to let that happen. While it is clear that Farooqi’s focus, and perhaps even sympathies, lie with the aging protagonists, he is acutely sensitive to all his character’s motivations. Although no relationship in Between Clay and Dust is completely fulfilling, we understand why the lives of these people make that so. Glum though the novel may be, it is never self-indulgent and doesn’t put characters through their paces simply for the sake of unearned drama.

Farooqi also resists the temptation to use history as a crutch. There is an early reference to the “changeful decade” after Partition that led to the decline of both the pahalwan and courtesan cultures but neither the era nor the setting dominate the universality of the themes Farooqi is truly interested in exploring.

Between Clay and Dust may be a fall-from-grace story but that decline is thrust upon the characters. In the eternal debate between fate and free will, Farooqi does not take sides but prefers showing how we deal with matters beyond our control. We may not be able to direct every contour of our existence; still we should not use that as an excuse for despair and inertia.
Ramzi’s and Gohar’s responses may not be perfect — pride and ambition are among their many failings — but Farooqi is entirely
successful in showing us that we still retain the power, if not to shape our destinies, to at least react to our waning fortunes with a contradictory brew of emotions that range from despair to forbearance. And that, more than anything else, is what makes us human.

The reviewer is a freelance journalist

Between Clay and Dust
(NOVEL)
By Musharraf Ali Farooqi